Carry the One (Simon and Schuster) by novelist and painter Carol Anshaw is one of the most favorably reviewed novels of 2012. In the novel, Anshaw's fourth, a group of friends, including siblings Carmen, Alice and Nick, are involved in an accident resulting in the death of a young girl named Casey. Casey is the "one" that the survivors of the accident carry with them for the rest of their lives, each of them finding a way to come to terms with the tragedy. Alice paints portraits of Casey, for example. Anshaw wisely balances the sorrow with generous doses of humor.
Gregg Shapiro: Carry the One has received some exceptional press. Were you prepared for the reception the book has gotten?
Carol Anshaw: No, of course! I'm a total worry-wart. So I imagined horrible, savage reviews! But they haven't been. On the other hand, it's a book I took a very long time writing, I revised it and revised it. I compressed it from 350 to 250 pages, so I feel really gratified. I get so many e-mails every day from readers who appreciate the book in the ways that I wanted people to get it. That's an author's dream. Forget the cocktail party or the Amazon ranking. It's feeling, like Forster said, "Only connect."
Dogs play a supporting role in Carry the One, as they did in Lucky in the Corner. What role do dogs play in your life?
It's huge. I enjoy the company of dogs. I go to the dog beach every day with my dog Tom. For him, mostly, but maybe a quarter of it is for me to play with other dogs, to have them come up to me. I'm honored if a Great Dane comes up to me and allows me to pet him. Dogs are great. And once you know them, you get a little glimpse of their world. There are still fundamental differences. I never want to crawl under an old house, for instance. I can't see the appeal, but I never had a dog who didn't want to do that!
In "The Limited Palette" chapter you write, "Painting was a world without clocks." Would you say that that is true of writing, too?
No, when I'm painting, I could lose four or five hours. I know that I'm thirsty or I have to pee or whatever it is that brings me back, gets me out of that chair to go down the hall. That never happens to me with writing. There are a lot of differences between the ways that you use your brain. I can tell because I play rock music while I'm painting, but I could never do that while I'm writing. I think I'm writing in a more conscious way than I am painting. Because if you ask me what am I thinking while I'm painting, I would have a hard time calling that up.
In the chapter "Enough Monkeys," you write about Alice's girlfriend Maude that she "had no idea how much Alice worked." As a writer as well as a painter, do you ever find yourself in a similar situation?
Luckily a lot of my friends are artists of one kind or another, and they know. While I was a struggling artist, which has been most of my life, I had to work seven days a week. I had to do something to pay for my fiction, which wasn't making enough money to support me. I just had to work all the time. I had to work to buy myself time to work.
The relationship of the siblings Carmen, Alice and Nick are at the center of the novel. Do you have siblings?
I've always longed for a sister. I don't have one. My brother's addictions are Nick's, and he also did not make it.
So you made a very personal investment in this book.
I had wanted to write a character with my brother Doug's addictions, and I asked him while he was still alive and he said, "Yeah, get the stories out there." I created a different person, but with his addictions. You see a lot about addicts in literature, but not so much about the families and how far down that pulls everybody, the centrifuge spinning around this craziness.
Nick is portrayed as something of a hopeless case when it comes to addiction and recovery. Do you think it is possible for an addict to overcome addictions?
A friend of mine who is big in AA told me that when I would tell her stories about Doug, he was the worst she'd ever heard of. He told me that there were people worse than him. There was a guy who lost his stomach to whiskey and he had a feeding tube, and they came into the hospital room and he was pouring a fifth of bourbon down the feeding tube. It can get worse than my brother, but he was pretty ferocious. He wasn't just an alcoholic, he was an addict, too. A barrel of fun there. But I wish he were still alive every day.
If there were a movie version of Carry the One , what would you want it to look like?
I have a friend who's been casting all along. I get little messages on my voice mail. I think it would be fun for the actors to age themselves, but there might have to be two sets of actors. I thought of Keira Knightley and Ally Sheedy for Alice, that kind of thing. But look at Meryl Streep, she just loves to put on a wig.